Abstract
While the previous chapter was necessarily concerned (given the absence of recorded history) with the movement of things, this chapter engages with the history of ideas and recent theories regarding cultural transmission and the circulation of representations. It is again demonstrated that movement and interaction open up new possibilities for thinking for both individuals and society.
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Notes
- 1.
“This ancient idea of a primeval egg which hatched the sun god occurs frequently; the sun myth took various forms in Egyptian thought” (Newall 1967, p. 4). In ancient India we find the image of the egg (a Cosmic Egg, the egg as a totality, as One) related to stories about the beginning of the world and the genesis of cosmos out of Chaos, for example in Mahabharata. Marian (1992) traces the image of the egg in other mythologies as well: Chinese, Tibetan, Phoenician, Persian, Greek, and so on.
- 2.
“The egg occupied an important position in the customs and beliefs of many nations (…). They appear on practically every major occasion in human life – at birth, courtship, marriage, the building of a new house, in sickness and in death, as well as on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Day and Easter Monday, when they are enjoyed as a strengthening food or given in return for holy water. Eggs are offered as gifts, paid as a due, and ornamented as a favourite decoration on festive occasions. They have been used in magic spells and in foretelling the future, in love potions and medicine, and have been thought effective in promoting healthy and fertile crops and animals” (Newall 1984, p. 21).
- 3.
- 4.
Those interested can find it online in the LSE thesis repository: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/415/.
- 5.
For more details, see Glăveanu (2017).
- 6.
For more details about these paradigms see Heitz and Stapfer (2017).
- 7.
“‘Migration of ideas’ opens up a vast field of study—how Indian and Arabic knowledge reached Medieval Europe; how Christianity, hand-in-hand with colonization, spread across the globe; how Marxism spread and adapted to different conditions; how technical innovations and scientific discoveries spread and get taken up in different contexts; how conquerers force their views and practices on the conquered; more recently how global capitalism and ‘McDonaldism’ has resulted in a depressing homogeneity around the world and so on” (Porter and Poerwandari 2008, p. 64).
- 8.
See Lovejoy (1940).
- 9.
- 10.
Tarde also considered imitation part of a much broader, universal law of repetition, found widely in nature.
- 11.
For more details, see Amati et al. (2019).
- 12.
See Hossain et al. (2016).
- 13.
Katz et al. (1963).
- 14.
- 15.
See Ryan and Gross (1943).
- 16.
“The critical mass, defined as the point at which enough individuals have adopted an innovation that further diffusion becomes self-sustaining. A focus on networks as a means of gaining further understanding of how a new idea spreads through interpersonal channels. Re-invention, the process through which an innovation is changed by its adopters during the diffusion process” (Rogers 2004, p. 19).
- 17.
“Uncertainty is the degree to which a number of alternatives are perceived with respect to the occurrence of an event and the relative probabilities of these alternatives. Uncertainty motivates individuals to seek information, as it is an uncomfortable state. Information is a difference in matter-energy that affects uncertainty in a situation where a choice exists among a set of alternatives (Rogers and Kincaid, 1981). One kind of uncertainty is generated by an innovation, defined as an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or another unit of adoption. (…) individuals are motivated to seek further information about the innovation in order to cope with the uncertainty that it creates” (Rogers 2003, p. xx).
- 18.
The five main steps of these processes are: (1) knowledge, (2) persuasion, (3) decision, (4) implementation (and potentially reinvention), and (5) confirmation.
- 19.
- 20.
“Governments and administrators were perfectly aware of the situation; they also knew that the loss of able craftsmen had ominous consequences for the economy. Decrees forbidding the emigration of skilled workers are not uncommon in the late Middle Ages as well as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Cipolla 1972, p. 49).
- 21.
“A number of circumstances could ‘pull’ craftsmen into a given area: a satisfactory level of effective demand, political peace and/or religious tolerance. Quite often there was also a conscious policy on the part of governments. Administrators busied themselves not only with menacing emigrants but also with devising ways to attract foreign craftsmen, especially those who could bring with them new industries, and/or new ways of doing things” (Cipolla 1972, p. 50).
- 22.
For a concrete example: “The invention of the automatic bottle machine consisted of the conception, experimentation, and model-building activities of Michael J. Owens; the pioneering efforts of the entrepreneurs at Toledo, Ohio, to demonstrate that the new production function was both practical and economically feasible constituted the innovational phase; and the gradual replacement of hand-blown and semiautomatic machine methods by the new process in both American and foreign markets involved diffusion” (Scoville 1951, p. 347).
- 23.
For a classic account and numerous practical examples see von Hippel (1988).
- 24.
See Pléh (2003).
- 25.
Dawkins (1976, p. 206).
- 26.
“The memes that proliferate will be the memes that replicate by hook or by crook. Think of them as entering the brains of culture members, making phenotypic alterations thereupon, and then submitting themselves to the great selection tournament – not the Darwinian genetic fitness tournament (life is too short for that) but the Dawkinsian meme-fitness tournament. It is their fitness as memes that is on the line, not their host's genetic fitness, and the environments that embody the selective pressures that determine their fitness are composed in large measure of other memes” (Dennett 1998, n.a.).
- 27.
Dawkins (1976, p. 206).
- 28.
Sperber (1996).
- 29.
Pléh (2003, p. 23).
- 30.
- 31.
As Kashima (2000) explains, “by elaboration, he meant an increase in complexity of cultural forms. For instance, various cultural elements may be integrated together into a complex whole. Bartlett also suggested that a greater complexity can be achieved by reduplication, that is, recursively repeating the same pattern, by unconscious inventions, or by conscious analyses of cultural elements. Alternatively, transmitted elements may undergo simplification. One form is assimilation in which one element may absorb the other elements to dominate the overall structure. Other forms of simplification may include the loss of cultural elements when their reproductions are less than perfect, when interests of the group change over time, or when a group holding the cultural elements is cut off from its surrounding community, thereby losing its vitality” (p. 389).
- 32.
See Moscovici (2001).
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Glăveanu, V.P. (2020). Ideas on the Move. In: Mobilities and Human Possibility. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52082-3_4
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